It is becoming increasingly popular to deploy Node.js-based applications to Node-friendly hosting services to take advantage of the pre-built, reliable, robust architecture and infrastructure these services provide. Persevere, a JavaScript server framework for developing RESTful applications on Node.js, is an excellent fit for these types of hosting services.
Dojo has an API for Comet-style real-time communication based on the WebSocket API. WebSocket provides a bi-directional connection to servers that is ideal for pushing messages from a server to a client in real-time.
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Data querying is a critical component of most applications. With the advance of rich client-driven Ajax applications and document oriented databases, new querying techniques are needed, and Resource Query Language (RQL) defines a very simple but extensible query language specifically designed to work within URIs and query for collections of resources.
NodeJS has demonstrated impressive performance potential as an HTTP server. By combining highly optimized HTTP parsing algorithms with the speedy V8 JavaScript engine and using an event-based architecture, Node has posted eye-opening request handling numbers.
The NoSQL movement continues to gain momentum as developers continue to grow weary of traditional SQL based database management and look for advancements in storage technology. A recent article provided a great roundup of some of the great new technologies in this area, particularly focusing on the different approaches to replication and partitioning.
The REST architecture has become increasingly recognized for its value in creating scalable, loosely coupled systems. REST is presented as a network interaction architectural style, not a programming methodology. However, the principles of REST can actually be very meaningfully and beneficially applied in the programming realm.
Pintura is a REST-style web framework that provides a comprehensive solution for Ajax-based thin-server applications. However, Pintura has a very modular design, and many of the modules in Pintura are extremely useful as standalone JavaScript/CommonJS components that can be used with Node, Narwhal and other projects. Let’s look at the JSGI middleware modules.
CommonJS (formerly known as ServerJS) has become the essential hub around the development of server side JavaScript (SSJS). SSJS for years has suffered from fragmentation, but the CommonJS project has provided the momentum to bring different frameworks together and start building interoperable modules.
Persevere 1.0 is now available for download. Persevere is a JavaScript storage and application server that uses a standards-based interface of HTTP/REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and REST Channels. Persevere is designed for rich client applications and can be used with any framework or client.
Persevere‘s security system provides a powerful infrastructure for controlling access to a system by combining the best aspects of capability-based security with role-based security. Persevere has a full user management system and granular per-object access control with inheritance.
Persevere stores structured data in the same way data is represented in JavaScript and JSON. Various different data types can be persisted including numbers, strings, booleans, objects, arrays, dates, functions, and even binary data. Most of these data types are familiar to JavaScript developers; however, binary data is usually not seen in JavaScript.
There are fundamental differences between the roles of application code and framework library modules within an application. Framework libraries provide reusable services that encapsulate lower-level functionality in an abstraction that offers functionality with an easy to use API for higher level code within a variety of different applications.
Persevere‘s latest release includes new functionality for creating clean, organized application directory structures, complete with a testing framework. Persevere now has an improved set of command-line options including a server generator, which makes it easy to build an application server directory that can be version controlled separately from the Persevere core files.
As 2008 wraps up, there are a number of announcements and noteworthy items surrounding Dojo, DWR, Persevere, and SitePen services.